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Believe it or not, until recently, it has been perfectly legal for schools to force schoolchildren to be put on psychoactive mind-altering drugs as a condition of attending that school. That is, the school administrator or counselor could insist that a certain child be dosed with mind-altering drugs. It sounds bizarre, but it was absolutely true until just recently.

Finally, Congress has passed legislation that bans schools from forcing parents to drug their children for behavioral problems. This law was even signed by President Bush, believe it or not.

Now you may think that, gee, this wasn't a problem, I never heard about this. But in fact it was a huge problem. There have been many cases where children were denied an education because their parents refused to put them on narcotic stimulants, antidepressants and other drugs that we now know cause violent behavior and increased risk of suicide. There were schools actually forcing parents to put their children on drugs that would cause aggressive behavior and suicidal thoughts. And, in extreme cases, these drugs actually caused or contributed to the kind of mass murders like we saw in Columbine where the two high school students picked up assault rifles, went to school, and blew away teachers and classmates. These two kids were on antidepressant drugs -- it's still one of the most censored stories of the last decade.

Think about it: these kids were taking antidepressants when they blew away their classmates and teachers. And yet the school districts are insisting that more children be put on these drugs!

Now, I knew there were problems with the public school system, I knew that a lot of public education was a complete waste of time and that many public schools are nothing more than taxpayer funded daycare. But even I was horrified to learn that our public schools are turning into mental institutions and forcing children to be dosed on psychoactive drugs just to be there. What happened to the right of children to have an honest education these days? What happened to the right of parents to protect their children from the abusive behavior of drug companies and psychiatrists who irresponsibly over-prescribe these drugs even though they're increasingly aware of the toxic, dangerous side effects of these drugs?

(By the way, three years ago, anybody who said that antidepressant drugs cause violent behavior was called a nut case. Now it's a commonly recognized scientific truth, published in peer-reviewed journals and widely acknowledged by the scientific community. It just goes to show you how unpopular it is when you're a few years ahead of the public perception on these things.)

This law has been needed for quite some time. And who was against this law? Of course, it was the psychiatrists! The community of psychiatrists did not want to let go of this power, because when you have the power to force children to take drugs and to force parents to put children on those drugs, you have consolidated power over entire communities. That's what the psychiatrists have done -- when psychiatrists were given the right to prescribe drugs, they were given power, and they don't want to let go of that power. So they fought bitterly against this bill and they aren't happy with its passage.

But of course, they're continuing to just invent new fictitious diseases by diagnosing children with so-called mental disorders that have no verifiable scientific basis whatsoever. These diseases are completely fictional (like "social anxiety disorder" and "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder"). The hallucinations, it seems, are in the minds of the psychiatrists, not in the minds of the children. And when it comes to behavioral disorders, if you want to calm down the children and help them pay attention and learn more effectively, you've got to look at nutrition, not drugs. You have to get the sugar out of their diets, you have to take the food additives and the hydrogenated oils and the high-fructose corn syrup out of their diets. When you do that, 80% of these children that have been diagnosed with ADHD become non-ADHD children in two weeks or less. 80%. All you've got to do is take these food additives out of their diet, and all of a sudden they're normal, wonderful children who can learn and focus. They don't need drugs.

The threshold for drugging children is far too low in this country -- we have far too many people interested in the power, the profits and the control of drugging children. And it is laws like this that we need passed in this country. We need people to know (especially parents) that they don't have to agree to having their children dosed on toxic drugs. They have the right to say no! They have the right to protect their children from the ambitions of psychiatrists, the megalomania of an industry that wants to drug entire populations, and the profit-seeking ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry.

What's interesting is that one of the main proponents of this bill was the Citizen's Commission on Human Rights (CCHR). Other groups that supported this law include the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Foundation of Women Legislators (NFWL), and Parents for a Label and Drug Free Education.

You may wonder why the NAACP, in particular, backed legislation like this. The answer is because it was predominantly black children who were being labeled as problem children and dosed with these drugs. The black community in America is watching an entire generation be dosed up with mind-altering drugs. That's as sad as anything I've ever seen in this country. Instead of helping these young black children get an honest education and get the skills that they need to succeed in life, we had psychiatrists and drug companies just putting them on drugs that basically numb their brains to the point where, sure, they're no longer a behavioral problem, but they're not learning anything either. How does that help society? It doesn't. All it does is create another high school dropout who can't function because they didn't get an honest education.

I'm going to be called a racist for saying this (like I care), but here goes: there are a lot of white psychiatrists drugging the heck out of low-income black children and calling it "medicine." That's not medicine, that's a chemical assault on the children of America. And frankly, African Americans have every right to be outraged about it.

So let's stop drugging our children and let's start teaching them for a change. Let's get the psychiatrists out of our schools and get the drug companies away from our children. Why is it that we teach our children to "just say no to drugs," and then we turn around and dose them up on powerful narcotics anyway? What kind of message does that send to our nation's youth?

While we're at it, let's start paying teachers honest salaries so that we can attract and retain high-quality people into the teaching industry. Let's start funding our schools with the money they need to actually provide quality education and let's have some serious school reform so that we can eliminate the old bureaucracy that currently runs our public schools all across the country.

We have a system of education here that's 200 years old; nothing much has changed! We still have chalkboards, erasers and stodgy lecture formats for conveying information to students. We need something new in our schools, and there are a lot of hard-working teachers and administrators who have great ideas but are shut down by the bureaucracy and psychiatrists who insist on drugging the students. Let these people have a chance to get some work done, to do the teaching they want to do, to put new ideas into action and see what works in terms of educating our children. I believe that teachers are teachers for the right reason -- they want to work with children; they want to help children learn. We need to give them the tools and the funds that they need to be better teachers, and that means making sure our kids are off of drugs so they have the state of mind necessary for learning.

Because right now, we're not raising a generation of smart, well-educated children. We're producing a wave of over-diagnosed, over-drugged, over-labeled children who are increasingly incapable of functioning as productive citizens in society.